Use Ubi with Document Camera

Ubi Support
- August 17, 2016 23:02

The document camera is an amazing tool that allows teachers to have a more dynamic and interactive classroom. It lets the teachers move past the white board into the world of actual objects, physical documents etc. A historic map of your city, a dissected frog, a sculpture and even a worksheet can come alive under the eyes of the camera.

So, there is no wonder that, there are a wide variety of choices for document camera out there in the market. There are relatively expensive and sophisticated models from Elmo , Aver and Epson. Then, there are pretty straightforward webcam-like choices from Ipevo, HoverCametc.

There is one thing however, common across all of them – a clunky, hard to learn software. Often times, schools end up buying different cameras for different classrooms and teachers end up mastering different software for each device. Interestingly enough, these software never support other manufacturer’s cameras even though at heart they are all very similar.

That is why teachers start asking us – can Ubi help us out ? As you know, we can never say ‘no’ to teachers.

What Ubi has now is a powerful, yet simple app that works with almost all document cameras out there. As long as they work as standard USB cameras, they will work with Ubi Camera app. Even better, you can now use any webcam as a document camera.

Some of its features include

Annotation : You can write, and highlight on top of the camera with ease. You can pick different colors and line size.

Zoom in and Zoom out: You can either use touch gestures or the buttons to zoom in and out the camera view. This can be especially useful when you want to show the finer details of the objects. When you zoom in and out, the annotations also scales accordingly.

Panning: Teachers love this feature because they can adjust the focal point of what they are talking about by just panning via the app rather than physically moving the object in front of the camera.

Ubi Camera app is available as part of the standard Ubi sensor application as well as Ubi Apps for Education.

To get the best value out of Ubi camera, you need to use it along with Ubi sensor. Ubi sensor turns any whiteboard or TV screen into a large interactive display. The Ubi Camera app can be launched with one click when you are using ubi sensor. You can zoom in, pan and annotate on the camera view right on your whiteboard without ever going back to the camera. This saves time and also helps to keep the students’ attention always on the teacher. No more fidgeting with the camera, no more running back and forth to your whiteboard.

Pick which document camera to connect to

Choose the Mode of Interaction

You can pan the image, write, highlight and erase

Pick the color for writing and highlighting

Pick the line thickness for writing or highlighting

Annotate on the image

Pan and Zoom images

Use the buttons or pinch gesture to zoom. Swipe to pan. The annotations zoom in and out as well when you zoom the image.